Forms of Knowledge by Anna Aragno

“Anna Aragno takes aim at the big questions in psychoanalysis. She provides a “way of mapping out the formulation and exposition of a semantic of significant forms with meaning neither tied to nor one with language.” Her thoughtful use of data drawn from the supervisory situation and psychoanalysis itself add to the empirical database for her conclusions.Thus she accounts for the many avenues enabling comprehension that have evaded prior description. I delighted in reading
this encompassing tract and believe it should be examined and debated within the psychoanalytic community as a project that reopens the discussion about the sources and mechanisms of the process employed in comprehension.”

—Theodore Shapiro, M.D.

This is the first comprehensive work emerging from psychoanalysis correlating with a contemporary “information” paradigm and “inter-penetrative” world view. As such it examines interrelationships between forms of communication and the development of “mind” and conscious awareness, maintaining that these process-phenomena are integral to psychoanalytic methodology. Psychoanalytic situations here become research venues for a metatheoretical study of human communication from a bio-semiotic perspective that examines emergent forms of pre-semiotic and linguistic interactions in a six-stage developmental model of unconscious and conscious modes of communication. The now vastly expanded interpretive purview of the psychoanalytic semantic thereby becomes an empirical window into the evolution, development, and transformative potential of conscious awareness as it is co-constructed through our specialized dialogues. By focusing on the forms of interaction themselves the study lifts the locus of observation out of relational and classical positions and into a developmental/evolutionary framework, providing overarching principles for theory and practice in a unified psychoanalytic metapsychology. This book is for those who want to deepen their understanding of the psychoanalytic and supervisory processes and the dialogical phenomena arising therein.

Anna Aragno, Ph.D., born in Italy, educated in England, came to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship. With a background in the arts, humanities, and
languages, she entered psychoanalytic studies from a broad interdisciplinary base with a particular interest in the philosophy of science, epistemology, and meta-theory. Dividing her time between a private practice and writing she has published many papers, chapters, and two volumes with a strong focus on metapsychological revisions. In recent years she has become affiliated with various academic communities of scholars in Europe.